As a composition student under Paavo Heininen's mentorship, Kaija Saariaho (1952-2003) was fascinated by poetry that had an experimental and playful relationship to verbal expression, a lot of which was written in Swedish. In 1979, she was very much immersed in the output of a Swede Finn, Gunnar Björling, and from his poetry she composed Nej och inte, a song cycle for a cappella female voices. In 1982, Saariaho isolated one of those songs to make this version for soprano and piano, which was premiered at the Lappeenranta song competition in 1984.